The Biden administration will officially update the new federal EV charging standard to the J3400 based on Tesla’s plug, acting Federal Highway Administrator Kristin White announced Tuesday.
It’s officially the Tesla-based J3400
Independent standards organization SAE International announced in October that it had released J3400, the new open standard based on the Tesla charging technology. Yesterday, White said at a conference hosted by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation:
In the coming weeks, you will be seeing an update from the federal agencies on what we call the J3400 standard. That will be the standard moving forward, and we’re really happy to report that out.
White told POLITICO that the update, which will provide “clarification” on using flexibilities under the existing rule, would be completed before the Trump administration takes over. The Federal Highway Administration plans to issue FAQs and hold a webinar on December 17.
Electrek’s Take
This is great news. As my colleague Jameson Dow explained in a post last year, the J3400 charging connector, which is based on Tesla’s NACS plug, offers numerous benefits, so it makes sense as the federal standard. Thanks to SAE’s involvement, it is now an open standard, no longer tied to a single automaker.
For example, the J3400 should make installation and charging cheaper and easier for businesses and multifamily dwellings, make charging more interoperable between commercial and personal vehicles, and create new possibilities for EV street charging. It’s worth reading Jamie’s post here.
But how is having a new federal standard going to affect the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program? NEVI currently requires that each federally funded EV charging station must have at least four CCS ports that can charge at 150 kW simultaneously.
I’m guessing this is where the flexibility will come in – the Biden administration isn’t just going to trash the CCS port-equipped charging stations that are in the pipeline or are already in place as it phases in the J3400.
Besides, many of us have CCS ports on our cars and don’t yet have access to Superchargers. And even when we do get access, we’ll still use those CCS chargers.
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